As for comment transparency, thanks for the support Andy, but there is a longstanding mechanism for audiences to understand the context/conflicts of any commenter and that is the siglink — that’s why anonymous commenters carry less credibility than transparently siglinked ones. I transparently siglinked to my blog here and at webomatica. The front page of my blog mentions payperpost no fewer than 8 times, including where I list my investments. PPP is also listed in my sitewide Disclosure Policy, linked from every page. Compare that approach to Jason’s comment at http://thermalblog.co.uk/the-golden-donkeyp/#comments when he had no Disclosure Policy and zero ThisNext disclosure on his homepage and you’ll realize you’re debating the wrong guy.

That does, however, highlight another value of Disclosure Policies — they provide a goto place for anyone to understand the biases of a commenter via siglink. As always, conflicts may be small or large, but a Disclosure Policy can cover the spectrum. I’d love to see you lead by example by adopting one at your blog and getting Jason to do the same

I understand you are in a tough position. You are trying to build a business that enables bloggers to make money from publishing their product reviews/recommendations. Your board member and shareholder, Jason Calacanis, is mandating disclosure in a manner that makes ThisNext appear hypocritical along with himself.

So what do you do? Publicly reject Jason’s first sentence disclosure mandate, follow his mandate or separate him from your company/shares — any of those moves can help ThisNext appear less hypocritical.

In the meantime, I’d love you to answer the question Jason has refused to answer: What is ThisNext’s business model and what are all the ways it makes money?

Thanks for your thoughtful response to my comments.

I understand your desire to defend Dan whom I am sure is a perfectly nice guy. You know him from seeing him around the blogosphere and know he disclosed at least once. Therefore you judge him trustworthy, regardless of however self-interested his remarks about PPP might be.

Fine, it is your prerogative to do as you like on your blog.

That said, to make the leap that he should be let off the hook because people just “know” who he is and his relationship to PPP is not fair to me, to him, or to your readers.

Lets look at the situation: Dan stands to make millions off of PPP if the company is successful. He is obviously heavily biased in PPP’s favor. (Would be interesting to know how biased: maybe he would be transparent enough to publish PPP’s cap table). You are asserting that it is OK for him not to disclose this every time since it is incumbent upon your readers to just “know” this about him, no matter Dan’s potential upside. In short, your readers should be smart enough to figure out Dan’s motivations when he writes.

Now lets look at what you are advocating for the general blogger: apparently you feel their readership is less smart than yours since you would require the general blogger to always disclose any potential transactions, no matter how small, lest those general readers be duped by a wily blogger keen on making his latte money off of a CPA fee. (Readers who care about the affiliate deals in place can almost always tell if there is a CPA relationship so explicit disclosure of CPA is easily checked if not already assumed to be in place.)

That looks like a double standard and strikes me as profoundly unfair. More unfair than the implied diss in the comments about how I, Jason, or ThisNext have anything to hide.

There seems to be two competing ethical claims at work here:

1, a desire for disclosure in the name of the common good
2, a desire for autonomy by bloggers in the name of the common good

You seem to recommend the latter for yourself and Dan while advocating the former for general bloggers and companies like sixapart, ThisNext, and others. How come you get to choose your regular audience over the general internet user whereas other bloggers must favor the general internet user and not their regular audience?

Now all that being said, I *am* open to evaluating ThisNext’s policies but no one still has articulated why TN is different from existing blogging companies wrt disclosure. Further, what, beyond adding red tape, you would hope to achieve by having TN, which pays no one affiliate fees and which is simply a common carrier and which has no particular interest (financial or otherwise) in what products a blogger chooses, force itself into the relationship between bloggers and their readers?

Please don’t take these comments in the wrong spirit. I enjoy the debate and look forward to working w/you all to make the Net even more cool than it already is ;-)

Disclosure is a tough subject in regards to comments

Soliciting – I am solicited about new products or companies available to affiliates on a daily basis, 20 or 30 emails per day, and that isn’t counting the email marketing trying to get me to buy products.

I choose which products I review, even when I am solicited.

Within the PPP you can pick and choose – Dan well knows that whilst I display the “review my post” badge, I have never written an opp for Pay Per Post – nothing has yet been appropriate for my readership and time.

I know affiliates who won’t send an email to their list unless they are guaranteed to earn $20 to $50K from a single email.
With some that requires a cash payment upfront even to look at the offer.

You might find my other discussion on disclosure interesting
http://andybeard.eu/tag/disclosure

In particular I would like to highlight this post about Clickbank

http://andybeard.eu/2007/02/clickbank-require-disclosure-a-list-bloggers-totally-missed-the-point-in-december.html

I know both Dan and Ted have read it, but very few others because attacks on Pay Per Post are fashionable and don’t affect people’s personal financial interests.
I have asked Jason in comments before why he doesn’t attack affiliate marketing, especially affiliate marketing that includes product reviews that are not disclosed.

I have trackbacks on my blog, the only links to that post are my own, and one from a social bookmark site.

That is significant bias in the blogosphere

Today I spent some time browsing the blog on ThisNext – whilst there is no hyped marketing, there is definitely WOMM and encouragement to try products.

In many ways the ThisNext blog reminded me of many of the PayPerPost blogs that are heavily criticised by Jason and his readership.

No fixed niche
Possibly unrelated content
A casual visitor wouldn’t spot a relationship between the blog owner suggesting the product, and the content being mentioned
No disclosure

It has been mentioned many times that Amazon, Ebay, CJ, Linkshare, and even Google have to encourage disclosure.

In fact Google actively discourage disclosure for their referral units
http://andybeard.eu/2007/01/google-requiring-affiliates-not-to-declare-ftc-womma.html

No WOMM should be exempt, so why should paid post companies who have taken action on disclosure not point the finger at affiliate related services (and people) who quite frankly haven’t.

Solutions for disclosure also aren’t sexy. I invested time and money in my disclosure policy plugin, a little more time in a feedflare for feedburner, but that doesn’t get any coverage whatsoever.

If you go a little further back in my archives, you will see references to qualified legal opinion regarding disclosure and affiliate marketing

http://andybeard.eu/tag/disclosure/page/2/

Firstly, I suggest you walk your talk and disclose you are an investor in PPP whenever you are stumping for the company or start slinging accusations of hypocrisy at me, ThisNext, or Jason.

Secondly, I am not “pointing fingers” at affiliate networks. I am merely observing that the blogosphere is rife w/undisclosed affiliate links and no one seems to object to them in the vast majority of cases. If you have an issue w/the behavior of millions of bloggers and want to call out their “hypocrisy”, so be it, Sisyphus. This rather parochial objection of yours does, however, seem to be at odds w/your earlier, non-PPP-disclosed comments about how you believe bloggers own their relationship w/their readers and should disclose as they see fit. To quote you:

” I’m a market-forces guy and a firm believer that bloggers own their blogs and their audience relationship.” (see http://www.webomatica.com/wordpress/2006/10/15/blogs-splogs-flogs/#comment-156)

To me, dragging ThisNext into the debate is a diversionary tactic of trying to play gotcha w/Jason and thereby deflect attention away from PPP’s arguably dubious strategy.

ThisNext offers a free service where we pay *no one* to write about products they love.

I don’t see much difference between what we offer and what blogging platforms offers w/their automated Amazon links in terms of ethical propriety. If someone can cogently explain the difference, I am happy to discuss it, but so far it seems like a lot of arm-waving in an attempt to draw ThisNext into a debate that is only tangentially relevant to us.

@ Andy

Thanks for the heads up re: the case.

WRT to the question of whether there is parity between PPP and ThisNext, please consider the difference between *commissioning/soliciting* people to write about *specific* products for money vs a place where *any* product can be discussed and no money changes hands between the platform and the contributor. IOW, ThisNext encourages no particular focus on any particular products and and not shilling our contributors.

Despite VC Dan’s pseudo-allegations above, ThisNext has nothing to hide. I believe in disclosure but, like I said above, no one has been able to explain why ebay widgets or typepad affiliate links are somehow exempt from disclosure while ThisNext is somehow obligated. If anything, ThisNext ought to be even further removed any ethical debate since only a fraction of the items are even potentially monetizable vs everything being monetizable.

@Gordon – I assumed there might be some kind of database product search built into the system, from which users could select products. I do need to look at the system more closely, but can’t.
I must admit I tend to avoid signing up for services that are even loosely similar to services I might intend to create in the future and I take special care reading user agreements.

It is very hard to disclose a business that only exists on an business plan, and how I make disclosures regarding particular services could potentially be too revealing.

ThisNext is as much a competitor to my own plans as maybe Amazon or Ebay, but you are doing things a little smarter.

The technology and the software underlying our Website and the Services is the property of ThisNext, our affiliates, and our partners. You agree not to copy, modify, rent, lease, loan, sell, assign, distribute, reverse engineer, grant a security interest in, or otherwise transfer any right to the technology or software underlying our sites or the Services. You agree not to modify the software underlying our sites in any manner or form or to use modified versions of such software, including (without limitation) for the purpose of obtaining unauthorized access to our sites.

A case that is really interesting is

Beyond Systems, Inc. v. Keynetics, Inc., 2006 WL 687156, D.Md.,2006., Feb 14, 2006

The company whose sole financial interest was the sale of a platform for enabling the sale of products provided by a 3rd party affiliate system was being held liable. I haven’t been able to find the final outcome.

There is no point in a company suing individual affiliates, they much prefer to go after platform owners and the affiliate programs themselves. I am not a lawyer, thus I don’t know how something like this might affect ThisNext.

You are correct saying that affiliate programs do differ from PPP – an affiliate benefits financially from higher conversions if they are able to say something positive about a product, however not all affiliate marketing is WOMM, thus not all affiliate marketing requires disclosure.

An Amazon widget or Ebay widget wouldn’t require disclosure, because they are just display adverts based on CPA/PPA

The same is true of Google’s new service to a large extent, though maybe it is possible to refer to direct products.

With Amazon and Ebay it is possible however to directly refer to a single product, just like your mini review blogs and I have seen it is possible to actually create inserts within real blog posts.

ThisNext do seem to have some kind of policy on WOMM based on the following.

(ii) publish falsehoods or misrepresentations that could damage ThisNext or any third party; (iii) submit material that is unlawful, obscene, defamatory, libelous, threatening, pornographic, harassing, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive, or encourages conduct that would be considered a criminal offense, give rise to civil liability, violate any law, or is otherwise inappropriate; (iv) post advertisements or solicitations of business: (v) impersonate another person. ThisNext does not endorse any User Submission or any opinion, recommendation, or advice expressed therein, and ThisNext expressly disclaims any and all liability in connection with User Submissions.

It seems to me PayPerPost are just facilitating a relationship between companies that want to be talked about and bloggers, yet Jason and many of his readership are holding them liable for every utterance made by a Blogger.

If ThisNext is just a platform, like PayPerPost, how are you able to claim being exempt?

Surely every 3rd post on your blog should be encouraging people to use proper disclosure.

It is actually interesting the contempt Jason shows for search engine optimization, when ThisNext is a service whose very essence is a highly optimized reviews platform with extremely interesting linking structures.
The ThisNext business model is based on monetizing search engine position gained from the use of various widgets and blog inserts. thisnext-20

My own solution potentially is more viral and possibly better SEO potential, but a lot of the same characteristics.

@ Dan – Jason does now have some disclosure of ThisNext after constant prodding, mainly from me I think in public, though obviously not to the standards he wants other bloggers to use (first line in every post)

One thing that he did make clear in the video I forgot to mention is that he is not a shareholder in AOL

@James – I need more plugin suggestions – I will have to open up the first round of voting soon.

@John – I didn’t want to be too critical. In some ways I wish Dan was in the room as well – similar to the Techcrunch Podcast a while back